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General Discussion

James Arnold
James Arnold
3,986 Points
Posted by James Arnold
James Arnold
3,986 Points

'Bummer: Try Again' has got to go. It's a disservice to people trying to learn.

I absolutely love the content here on Team TreeHouse. The coding challenges in between lessons I feel like do a disservice to the rest of the content available though. The user should be receiving the Error message in the exact format that the interpreter is outputting. It's not helping anyone when you think your code is correct and the only message you get is "Bummer: Try Again." Where have I gone wrong? What line do I need to change? What am I missing here? None of that very important context is provided and it limits the potential of the end user to solve it on their own. Finally, caving to googling the question and you find out that it's because the code will only be accepted if the string 'Python' is capitalized or all lower case - not because you had any actual syntax issues at all. It's maddening.

2 Answers

James Joseph
James Joseph
4,885 Points
James Joseph
James Joseph
4,885 Points

I do think that if they want to get people to be like programmers they should start treating them as such. Maybe they think it'll give too much away but there should be tracebacks on errors of code if they're problems with it.

Sometimes they do actually provide useful information for example if you loop to infinity it'll say the process never completed or something along those lines but actually having useful information like logs is important.

Teaching people to read logs / errors is important anyway so why not start with code challenges?

James Arnold
James Arnold
3,986 Points
James Arnold
James Arnold
3,986 Points

You nailed it! I understand that it's a fine line. The code may actually be "acceptable" in terms of syntax and would not generate an error, even though it's not solving the problem Treehouse wants you to. But there needs to be more context provided to the end user then "Bummer: Try Again." We're all trying our best to improve and that sort of feedback helps no one.

Ryan McGuire
Ryan McGuire
3,758 Points
Ryan McGuire
Ryan McGuire
3,758 Points

It would be nice, great even, but I don't know how easy it is for them to update it. Sometimes it's easy to say something should be that way, but I am sure when they made this they were under a dead line, budget, etc. Trust me, I am with you, I think there are huge gaps in some of the python "tracks" I have taken and it is so frustrating to barely know where to begin with some of the challenges.

At times I just run my code in python or the workspace, maybe adding or modifying a few lines so that it will print or check something. Then once I think I have it put it back into the challenge.